Diasporial: “[September 15th] is a very special day for the Diaspora project. It has been exactly one year since the guys released the Diaspora source code! For a year now, people have been able to contribute to this project and set up pods. And so they did! Till date, 7371 commits have been made by the contributors and the four founders. In only a years time, the amount of Diaspora users has grown from 4 to over 100.000, spread over lots of pods! … It is rumoured that Diaspora will hit beta in November, on its Alpha release anniversary.”

Diaspora: “We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made. … Our developer community is growing. Diaspora has had over 100 unique code contributors and countless others have edited our wiki and updated Diaspora’s translations in over 51 languages. We have over 4,600 followers and over 840 forks, which means that tons of developers are checking out our code. That makes us the sixth most popular project on GitHub, right behind great open source projects like JQuery, Ruby On Rails, and Node, just to name a few.”

Diaspora: “There’s been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can’t help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We’re proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and tens of thousands of community members, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lined up to try Diaspora* – that is, by all of us who’ve stood up to say ‘there has to be a better way.’ We’re making a difference already.”

RWW: “There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it’s decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered. … Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had ‘aspects’ before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. … If Google Plus has taught us anything, it’s that normal people don’t feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. … Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it’s a departure from it’s current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It’s unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora’s potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. … If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks – and especially if we can read from them, too – it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn’t splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.”

TNW: “Diaspora has never pitched itself as direct competitor to the likes of Facebook – more an alternative model for how social networks could be designed. However, it’s gained a reputation from observers as ‘that quirky Facebook alternative that never quite made it.’ Whether there’s a need or desire for its product or not, it seems there’s life in the Diaspora team yet.”

Wikipedia: “Diaspora (stylized DIASPORA*) is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook. The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010. … Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or ‘pod’) to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.”

IEEE: “Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora ‘the Facebook killer,’ ‘the Facebook rival,’ ‘the anti-Facebook,’ ‘Facebook’s challenger,’ and ‘another Facebook wannabe.’ … The guys, however, don’t see themselves as competition. … They’re taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites … will use to bridge their services. … Choice, interoperability, and the chance to invent your own networking experience are what federated networks such the Diaspora pods are all about. … They don’t like that Facebook owns the data they share through the site and can mine or sell it to advertisers at will. … Above all, they don’t like that most ordinary people and many Web engineers have come to believe that seven-year-old Facebook represents the be-all and end-all of everything online socializing will ever be. … ‘The problem with Diaspora right now is it’s not designed to work with other providers out of the box,’ says Ben Zhao, a network security expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara [listen to an interview with Zhao].”

Diaspora Wiki: “Diaspora needs you! – Diaspora is an open source project, which means all our code and documentation is available for free to anyone online. It also means that, while there is a core team working on the project full time, it only thrives because we have a wonderful set of volunteer collaborators who help out in their free time. – Some of these volunteers are developers and help with the code, which is the ‘traditional’ way to help out an open source project, and is awesome. But many are not developers, and their contributions are awesome too. … Come talk to us. The best ways to get in touch in realtime are our Convore group, or IRC. Tell us what you’re interested in working on – code, tutorials, feature ideas, mockups, running a pod, helping with the wiki, other – and we can help you figure out how to get going.”

Diaspora: “Today we’re releasing the first set of invites for the Diaspora alpha at joindiaspora.com. Every week, we’ll invite more people, starting with our Kickstarter backers, and then moving through our mailing list. By taking these baby steps, we’ll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible. – We are proud of where Diaspora is right now. In less than five months, we’ve gone from nothing to a great starting point from which the community can keep working.”

TC: “After the money came in, the team sequestered themselves for the Summer to work on the project. Despite some hiccups, they were able to unveil the source of the project in September to mixed reviews. Meanwhile, a user-facing alpha launch was promised for October. That came and went, and they pushed the launch to Thanksgiving. Well, we’re two days away from turkey day, and Diaspora has delivered this time. … But the service is also quick to hedge their bets. ‘It isn’t perfect, but the best way to improve is to get it into your hands and listen closely to your response,’ they note about the aspects idea. They then go on to list five things they know they could do better, including: security, better APIs, better documentation, easier upgrades, and cleaner code. Yeah, that’s quite a few major things.”

Mashable: “Since the initial flurry of interest, we’ve been waiting to see how the project would pan out – and if the guys would give us a clearer picture of what it would look like. Back in September, the Diaspora team released their source code to developers, receiving less than enthusiastic reviews. According to the guys, however, dev feedback has been extremely helpful when it comes to fixing bugs and security holes. … In the meantime, however, we have to wonder if it will succeed. Facebook – despite the previous security crisis – is still going strong, and the alternative social network market is becoming more competitive…”